Monday, October 3, 2016

The Magnificent Seven - Review/Comparison

You magnificent bastards!

Instead
of offering a regular review, which are widely available, this will be more of
a review/comparison between this new film and the “original” The Magnificent Seven.

Growing
up, I watched a lot of Westerns. A lot
of Westerns. My dad loved them, and we
watched them together. It was a weekend
staple. I also watched a lot of
musicals. My mother loved them, and if
you wanted to get some of her movie/song lyrics, you needed to be well versed
(as it were). I’ve even watched
non-Western musicals—like Paint YourWagon—because they starred actors who were quintessential frontier
types. You simply haven’t lived until
you’ve heard Clint Eastwood singing despondently while walking among the trees,
or Lee Marvin doing a muddy dance rendition of “Hand Me Down That Can O’ Beans”.

If I
recall correctly, neither man touches a gun the entire movie, and the only
violence is some standard, friendly, neighborhood bar brawls.

You're as magnificent as ever!

So
it’s hardly surprising that this past Saturday I ended up in a theater this
weekend with my father to witness the remake of The Magnificent Seven. I’m
fairly certain I’ve seen most of the iterations of this movie starting with the
original template, The Seven Samurai and
then through the entire catalog of Magnificent
title (Return of the Seven, Guns of the
Magnificent Seven, and The
Magnificent Seven Ride) Battle Beyond
the Stars right through the anime Samurai
Seven including the Star Trek: Deep
Space Nine “The Magnificent Ferengi” and Black Adder’s “The Black Seal”.

Antoine
Fuqua pays some layered and obvious homage to the original throughout this new
telling of a rag-tag group of borderline criminals/heroes. The plot skews very little from the original source material Akira Kurosawa 60+ years ago.
There’s a bad man Peter Sarsgaard’s Bartholomew Bogue, harassing a small
town of mostly defenseless but decent folk.
He’s a dirty, rotten, low-down, no-good, yellow-bellied sap-sucker who
will stop at nothing to get what he wants, even if that means killing men,
women and I assume cute puppies and kittens.
To stop him, it will take hard, dangerous, men with some true grit (see what I did there?).

Enter
Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington), who is introduced in one of the most cliché Western-genre
ways possible—stopping just outside the bat-wing doors of a saloon, his shadow
hidden from the patrons while they all look in rapt attention before he pushes
inside to confront the bartender. Damn,
that’s cool! Fuqua made of point of that
in the film, “I kept reminding myself of when I was a 12‑year‑old boy, when I
was a kid watching it with my grandmother, what was the feeling I had? How much
fun was it? How cool were they?” Chisolm
isn’t a real person—he’s an archetype, an angel of vengeance and justice in an
unjust world. Like Yul Brenner’s Chris
Adams, he’s a champion of the cause because it’s the right thing to do
(sorta). For example: Chisolm wears his
gun on his right hip with the butt forward and pulls a “cavalry draw”—with his
right hand initially reversed. I assume,
like The Princess Bride’s Inigo
Mantoya, he does this on purposes because to draw any other way would leave him
unsatisfied and the fights would be over too soon.

"Why not just cross-draw, Denzel?"
"Reasons. Bad-ass reasons."

But
don’t look for this kind of draw to start becoming a staple of Westerns. It’s overly clumsy and dangerous. It can be practiced to perfection so that it’s
“as fast” as other kinds of draws, but it still points the barrel of the gun
(the end where the bullets come out) into the body of the shooter while his
finger is trying to find the trigger—not a combination most safety instructors
would advise.

Yep,
Chisolm is that good/dangerous.

And
he’s only the beginning. Chisolm,
spurred for “some reason” to draw out Bart Bogue,

Takes seven of you, huh?

begins to search out
similarly competent gunslingers. Chris
Pratt’s Joshua Faraday takes on the role originally personified by Steve
McQueen as Vin Tanner. A jokester,
prankster who is as quick with a witty retort as he is his own guns. If you look closely, you’ll see that at one
point Faraday uses a “mare’s leg” a shortened rifle made famous by McQueen on
the television series Wanted: Dead or
Alive and again by Zoe Washburn on Firefly. Ethan Hawke’s Goodnight Robicheaux is a Doc
Holliday type based in part on Robert Vaughn’s Lee, a poster-child for post-Civil
War PTSD. With him comes Byung-hun Lee
as Billy Rocks in James Coburn’s role, who can use a knife (or series of
knives) as well as anyone with a gun.

The
remaining three characters are somewhat wholly new, or looser conglomerates of
the original movie. Vincent D'Onofrio
as Jack Horne is something of a cross between Charles Bronson’s stoic, yet
warm-hearted Bernardo O'Reilly and big man Brad Dexter’s Harry Luck. Horst Buchholz as Chico, the hot-blooded
villager who wants to become a gunslinger is only sorta found in Martin
Sensmeier’s wonderful Comanche warrior, Red Harvest (we could have used a lot more of him and that's not just because I love archers!). Finally, Manuel
Garcia-Rulfo’s Vasquez doesn’t really have much of a parallel, although he
might be a mirror of Chris Pratt, and the two have a couple of clever exchanges
before the shooting starts.

Fun fact: Red Harvest is the name of the Hammett story
which Akira Kurosawa used as the basis for Yojimbo.

And
that’s really the heart of this movie.
Rather than the slower-paced 1960 film, which took a little more time to
develop all the characters, including a number of the townspeople, this updated
version is a quick build to the blow-em-up and shoot-em-out that dominates the
second half of the film. That’s not
necessarily a bad thing. The trailers
don’t hide what this story is about, and it delivers all that is promised and
then some. Bad Black Bart Bogue enlists
an army of 200 gunmen (read as cannon fodder) for our heroes to mow down,
rarely missing a shot or running out of ammunition until dramatic tension has
to be built while James Horner’s riff on the classic Elmer Bernstein score
soars and falls with our “heroes” efforts.

Make
no mistake, this is an updated classic Western that does right by its history
and its is modern audience. I don’t know
that the film needs to be seen on the big screen, but wow does it look
pretty. Certainly worth the price of
admission of you have any love for Westerns, or any of the actors that showed
up to pull leather.

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About Me

R.A. McCandless has been a writer both professionally and creatively for nearly two decades. He was born under a wandering star that led to a degree in Communication and English with a focus on creative writing. He is the author of the urban fantasy novel “Tears of Heaven” (EPIC Award Finalist) and “Hell Become Her” (due 2015). His short stories have appeared in “Nine Heroes: Tales of Heroic Fantasy”, “In Shambles” and “Gears, Gadgets and Steam”. He continues to research and write historical and genre fiction, battle sprinklers, and play with his three boys.